Back to results

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Instance-Optimized Database Indexes and Storage Layouts

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

For any modern database system, its physical design, which is composed of both the storage layout of the data itself and auxiliary data structures such as indexes, is a critical piece of maintaining high performance in the face of increasing data volumes. Existing physical design components are general-purpose: they achieve adequate performance for the average use case but don’t achieve optimal performance for any individual use case. These physical design components expose numerous configuration knobs that users must manually tune to achieve better performance for their individual use case, but tuning complex systems is labor-intensive, and poor tuning can result in degraded performance and increased costs. In this thesis, we explore how database systems can maximize performance while minimizing manual effort through instance-optimization, which is the process of designing systems that are able to automatically self-adjust in order to achieve the best performance for a given use case. We leverage instance-optimization to introduce novel designs for database indexes and data storage layouts that outperform existing state-of-the-art indexes and data layouts by orders of magnitude. We also demonstrate how to incorporate multiple instance-optimized database components into an end-toend analytic database system that outperforms a well-tuned commercial cloud-based analytics system by up to 3×.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Doctoral
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2022

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Ding, Jialin
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Kraska, Tim

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
  • Copyright MIT

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/147396
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/147396

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
related terms
citation

Ding, Jialin. Instance-Optimized Database Indexes and Storage Layouts. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2022. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/147396